PUPPETS FOR GROWN-UPS

Thursday

Eugene isn’t really Jeff Whitty’s home town, but he did go to school here and is a native of Coos Bay.

So the New York playwright is thrilled that his “Avenue Q” is about to be done by Eugene’s Lord Leebrick Theatre Company.

The popular, campy musical opened on Broadway in 2003, won three Tony awards and ran in Las Vegas and in London’s West End, in addition to two U.S. tours and productions around the world.

Lord Leebrick was just getting started when Whitty was a young theater student at the University of Oregon.

“Doing a show like this, it’s like you raise the child and put it through college and then it goes out and has a life of its own,” he said by phone from his home.

“Avenue Q” is an adult coming-of-age tale told with puppets in a spoof of the Public Broadcasting System children’s show “Sesame Street.” The show puts its own versions of the “Sesame Street” Muppets into very adult situations and deals explicitly with such issues as homosexuality and pornography.

In the play, Sesame Street’s odd couple Bert and Ernie become Rod and Nicky, a closeted gay Republican and his roommate, with whom he’s in love. Songs in the musical include “It Sucks to Be Me” and “The Internet Is for Porn.”

Whitty wrote the book. Music and lyrics are by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx.

A national tour performed the musical at the Hult Center last year, but rights for local productions only became available only this year.

Whitty said he’s been fascinated with what he has seen of various interpretations around the globe.

“My favorite ones have been, in Finland they did a totally different take on the show. And then in Rio de Janeiro they had a very sassy, very sexual one.”

It even works in countries where audiences haven’t grown up on “Sesame Street,” he said.

“Puppetry is in our human DNA,” Whitty said. “Even if they don’t get that we’re riffing on children’s television, they get the subversiveness of these childlike puppets doing what they do.”

The show here is being directed by Craig Willis, Lord Leebrick’s artistic director and a friend of Whitty’s from those UO days.

He decided the company should make its own puppets for the production after David Mort, an actor and Lord Leebrick’s development director, confessed to a youthful stint as a puppet-maker years ago in Chicago.

Mort drafted a team of half-a-dozen puppet-maker volunteers, enticing them with a free three-weekend workshop in puppet construction in return for their labor. The volunteers were, as of last week, still turning out what will be 31 puppets for the show.

“It worked out to be more cost effective for us, or at least about the same, and it gave us the creative control to say, ‘We want to do it this way,’?” Mort said.

For example, Mort designed his Kate Monster puppet as a redhead, as it will be operated by the redheaded Shannon AJ Coltrane.

He also made four separate versions of the Kate Monster in four different costumes, rather than a single puppet that would require quick and intricate costume changes during the show.

“This creates more work on our end of things but give us more versatility,” he said.

Musical direction is by Nathan Alef. Choreography is by Ben Goodman, puppetry training is by Rachael Carnes, scenic design is by Jonathon Taylor, costume design is by Elizabeth Helman and lighting design is by Janet Rose.

Fans of Whitty’s work will be happy to know he has two more musicals that are making their way on the national stage.

A musical version of Armistead Maupin’s popular series “Tales of the City,” which Whitty also wrote the book for, opened at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco in May and ran through July.

“We had a great run in San Francisco,” he said. “It was our first production, and we still have tons of work to do on it. My dream is to take it out of town” — by this, of course, he means out of New York — “for another production. The libretto is the most complicated thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m the one who’s writing it!”

Similarly, a musical version of “Bring It On,” the cheerleading movie series, had a run in Atlanta and goes into rehearsals this fall for a national tour. “I think it will make its way to New York,” he said. “Things look good for the show at this point.”

Whitty is also at work on another musical, one he’s reluctant to discuss publicly: “There’s nothing signed yet.”

Suffice it to say it’s very much in the vein of his other musical work.

So is he ever going back to nonmusical theater writing? (He also authored the nonmusical but very deft comedy “The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler,” which ran at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2008.)

Whitty laughed at the question.

“It’s funny you ask. I was never one of those kids who listened to cast recordings and dreamed of being in musical theater,” he said. “It just sort of happened that I got involved with ‘Avenue Q’ and developed the skill set in the course of working on it.

“It’s not something I want to do for the rest of my life. I just signed onto a new one, yes. I keep trying to get away from them, but there is something addictive about the process.”

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